Storage Server: Firmware

Firmware

The first thing to do, in order to get any software RAID program to run, is to flash the controller out of RAID mode. Only then all of the disks will be seen as just a bunch of disks - nothing else. JBOD that is, for short.

The board I have, comes with a LSI SAS2308 controller, to with I want to connect 12 SATA drives using three SAS-to-SATA breakout cables.

Drivers

There are two locations you can get the drivers for those LSI2308 controllers: the SuperMicro site, which at the time of writing offers the P20 version, and the ASRock Rack site, that describes quite nicely how to flash to P16, in order to support freeNAS.

My current verion is P19, RAID mode:

LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility Version 17.00.00.00 (2013.07.19) Copyright (c) 2008-2013 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2308_1(D1) Controller Number : 0 Controller : SAS2308_1(D1) PCI Address : 00:02:00:00 SAS Address : 5d05099-0-0000-5198 NVDATA Version (Default) : 11.00.00.01 NVDATA Version (Persistent) : 11.00.00.01 Firmware Product ID : 0x2714 (IR) Firmware Version : 19.00.00.00 NVDATA Vendor : LSI NVDATA Product ID : Undefined BIOS Version : 07.37.00.00 UEFI BSD Version : N/A FCODE Version : N/A Board Name : ASRSAS2308 Board Assembly : N/A Board Tracer Number : N/A

Note the "(IR)" in the Firmware Product ID section; I want that to read "(IT)". And, as freeNAS now supports P20, I'll go for the P20 version, off the SuperMicro site.

Flashing

Download, unzip and copy the DOS subdirectory contents to a bootable USB stick. I use Rufus and a freedos image for that purpose. Boot from it, and start the flashing:

Never mind the typo :)
After a while, you will see this:

You can find the address as "SAS Address" listed above (which output of the ASRock utility), or you can find it on the controller configuration pages (make sure the controller is marked as bootable, and press CTRL-C)

On this screen copy, you can see the new firmware version, 20, and mode: IT. Which is what I wanted. You can also see the address, by the way, formatted a bit differently. The last nine digit are displayed as '0:00005198'; SuperMicro seems to use a prefix of '5003048', the original ASRock being '5D0599'. We'll find out if it makes a difference in the next sequence: Storage Server: Software - FreeNas!

Asrock E3C224DI-14S IPMI not reachable

Storage Server: Documentation missing

There's definately some documentation missing on the IPMI settings. I managed to lock myself out of the IPMI (also know as 'Integrated Light Out', or ILO) management interface. Not sure how I managed to do that, but in the quest to find out how to restore devine powers, I noticed quite a lot of people suffered from this. And, the solution is quite simple, when you know it. As usual...

Two configurations

The cause of error probably was me updating the network configuration, using the dashboard, instead of using the BIOS update.

IPMI configuration at BIOS
Please note, in the BIOS, you have eth0 and eth1. Eth0 usually is the first interface, so when you assume this would be the IPMI interface, you assumed as I.

Link to Network configuration on the dashboard

Which is completely and utterly wrong... Eth1, which has the label IPMI for a reason, is the correct one, and is found as Port 8 (above the 2 USB ports).

what's with the eth0/eth1, then?

It turns out there's a nifty, quite undocumented feature, of IPMI fallback. the BIOS eth0/NCSI item can be used as IPMI fallback - in case eth1 is not connected... I found this because after the lock out, I could actually use the IPMI when all cables were plugged in. The NCSI port is port 6, or LAN1 (designated as such in the manual), or eth0 (as seen in the BIOS BMC configuration). For completeness sake, LAN2 is not mentioned in the BIOS, only in the Megarac SP configuration (and hard to find).

My recommendation

Stay away from the megarac SP network configration items. Use the BIOS, which takes precedence over the Mearace SP settings anyway, only, and only configure IPMI/eth1 for a fixed ip-adddress. You can always use arp -a to find out the DCHP-assigned ip address to the other interfaces. You can find the MAC-addresses of your LAN1 and LAN2 interfaces at the BMC configuration section of the BIOS, under BMC MAC Restore Tool:

Hope this helps anyone.